


evidence (seventeen-year-old case)

by scioscribe



Category: True Detective
Genre: Gen, Partnership, Post-Series
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-06-20
Updated: 2014-06-20
Packaged: 2018-02-05 11:37:56
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 596
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1817179
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/scioscribe/pseuds/scioscribe
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In which Rust finds concrete proof that Marty missed him and gets a little choked-up about it, albeit in a Rust kind of way.</p>
            </blockquote>





	evidence (seventeen-year-old case)

**Author's Note:**

> The audiobook in question does not exist, but the quotes are real.

It was one of those days where the heat pressed down on the back of Rust’s neck like a hand. The pavement on the parking lot burned right through his knees. He’d only gone out of the fucking air conditioning because Marty had been in there seesawing about whether or not he’d lost the last client’s check in the car and then bitching about how anymore his joints sounded like Jiffy Pop when he tried to stand up from a crouch. Like Rust couldn’t connect the dots on what he was asking.

Marty got exactly one case of Rust doing this on account of how he still remembered Marty on one knee in a parking lot a little while back. Partnership being the counterpoint of forgiveness—what happened when people’s memories were long instead of short.

So while Marty searched inside, Rust stuck his hand under the driver’s seat. The light fur of car interior. Dust. What felt like a paperclip. And something sturdier, squarish, maybe a box Marty could’ve put the check into if he hadn’t wanted (fucking ironies) to lose it.

Rust hooked it and landed it: a battered audiobook. Schopenhauer. There was a price tag still gummed onto the back—$49.99—and the creases of it where the discs were folded in were worn soft as velvet. The discs were scratched. Fingerprints on them. He slid everything back inside and looked again at the box for one of those orange garage sale stickers, something to indicate Marty had gotten it secondhand in 2002 as a gag gift for him, and the wear-and-tear was all from someone else. He came up with nothing. He sat there with the audiobook on his knees.

Marty came out, said, “You been a while, guess you didn’t find—”

Rust held up the book.

“Don’t you even start with that,” Marty said, his face abruptly pinker than it had been a minute ago. “Not like you made a convert. I just had all this driving to do, working on my own, and I needed some kind of noise. I didn’t even listen to it. Mostly just tuned it out—he’s even worse than you are.”

“So you just drove around,” Rust said, “half-listening to _The World as Will and Idea_.”

“Whatever the hell that means anyway,” Marty said. “There’s one on there called _Studies in Pessimism_ sounded about right.”

He thought of Marty riding next to an empty passenger seat listening to the man who'd inspired Nietzsche. Schopenhauer had said that two men, reunited after long years, must be disappointed, to think back on what they had been and what they hadn't achieved--fuck that--but he had also said every reunion was a "taste of resurrection." Better.

Rust had left Louisiana in 2002 because it seemed like it didn’t matter, the South or Alaska, because he was never going to be warm again. He let the day sink into him—the blister-hot parking lot, the sun like a lidless yellow eye, Marty—and got up, warm from head-to-toe with something he couldn't process correctly. His own knees popped and he hoped Marty caught that and noticed Rust was able to take getting old without whining about it so much. 

There were big blue plastic garbage cans in front of the office. Rust tossed the collected Schopenhauer in next to a banana peel and a porn magazine.

“Hey—”

“You ain’t gonna need it anymore,” Rust said, as much a confession of faith as he had ever made. “Now get down here and help me find our fucking check.”


End file.
